


the punishment of the hook

by arriviste



Category: 20th Century CE RPF, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Can't write Hemingway pastiche and also use semi-colons :(, F. Scott Fitzgerald/Ernest Hemingway - Freeform, Gen, Maglor Magloring Through History, making fun of Hemingway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-08-30
Packaged: 2020-07-30 20:06:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20102881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arriviste/pseuds/arriviste
Summary: "Shell exploded right near me," Hemingway said, with a nod of head towards the wine."How interesting," Maglor said politely.





	the punishment of the hook

**Author's Note:**

> “Then he began to pity the great fish that he had hooked. He is wonderful and strange and who knows how old he is, he thought.”  
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

There were a lot of people in Paris who the gazes of passers-by slid past. No one ever wanted to acknowledge the starved faces. Now there was a whole underclass of men who walked the streets like ghosts, _gueules cassées_ with shotaway chins imperfectly hidden by scarves and grievous scars hidden or not hidden by bandages or face-plates. Worse were the men who limped along with crutches or braces with their faces still too human and something terrible behind their eyes.

It was hard to drink champagne and dance all night to jazz and act as if the world was new and brilliant as a diamond when the human wreckage of the last age still clogged the streets. The young Americans did not look at the _poilus_. No one wanted to talk about the war. They were too young to have fought and the ones who had wanted only to forget about it. 

Hemingway liked to pride himself on looking. He noticed things and wrote them down in his notebook. He did not think the French were very interesting when there were crazy beautiful people sharing drinks and beds and brawls and Pernod to drink under the sun and Lady Duff with her long neck and her boy’s head and the men around her like a cloud of flies. There was Scott pale and beautiful with his hair combed into golden wings over each ear until you put a drink into him, and then he was green and his mouth was still beautiful. Hadley rumpled and red-gold. Gertrude and Alice like Jack Spratt and his wife and the things they said to each other. Things that Hemingway would drink to blot out if there was ever enough wine in the world to forget Gertrude’s thick voice pleading _please don’t, pussy, please_ while imperturbable dark Alice did – what? what? - and her long earrings left red marks on Gertrude’s thighs.

Something about Gertrude with her Roman emperor’s head always made him think about making it with her. It made him feel sick to think of it and hot and mortified which was the same way he felt when he spent too long looking at Scott and his mouth which was the mouth of a girl and not a man.

He noticed things. So in the cafe he noticed the man’s profile first. It was the sort of face you saw on overbred aristocrats kept in the dark and wrapped in cotton like china, with dark hair cut in slanted wings. He had the kind of fine bones you saw on women sometimes but sharper, like a bird’s. Everything was young about him except his eyes. He could hold his drink. Hemingway had been watching him for some time from across the bar. What had caught his interest was not the bird-bones or the china skin. His hands were terribly scarred.

“You’ve been watching me,” the man said. He didn’t sound drunk although he should have. He didn’t sound French either. His eyes were sea-grey and had seen the war. You knew these things when you had seen it for yourself.

“Marne? Somme?”

“Neither,” said the man. He looked Hemingway up and down like he didn’t think he’d been old enough to sign up.

“Italy,” Hemingway said unnecessarily.

“Hm,” said the man as though Italy was no great shakes.

“Let me buy you a drink,” Hemingway said, because that was how you got an old soldier on your side. You bought him a drink and you let him talk about the mud and the blood and in your head you took notes.

The man unbent enough to offer his name when half the bottle was gone. "Maglor," he said. That couldn’t be right. Some bastardisation of _ma gloire_, probably. 

"Shell exploded right near me," Hemingway said with a nod of head towards the wine.

"How interesting," Maglor said politely.

"Saw a shell explode on a field hospital once. Women – nurses – bits of bodies everywhere. Women's legs still in bits of elasticised garter."

That usually impressed people. Maglor raised his eyebrows. 

Hemingway said, "Once I was driving an ambulance and a piece of hot shrapnel missed me and went through the throat of the man beside me. He made a terrible sound as he died."

The grey eyes closed. Hemingway caught fish but he preferred catching men. "Yes," Maglor said. There was something in his voice that made you strain your ears to catch it. "I watched a man walk into a, a shell-hole and die in flames. I can still smell him burning.”

Hemingway pushed the bottle towards him along the bar as an encouragement to go on.

Maglor said, "I killed people. In the wars."

"Who didn't?"

"I watched my father die."

"My father put a shotgun in his mouth."

"So did mine, in a way."

"Rough," Hemingway said. "It's always the old men. Your old man. When it's not your mother."

"I loved my mother."

"Hm."

"Everyone I love is dead or lost," Maglor said.

"That's the curse of our generation."

He tried to bring the conversation back to things seen in the war, because he liked things, concrete things. Images that were flame-flowers of horror in the mind. The man seemed on the point of crying or singing and not enough of the good white wine had been drunk to excuse it. They talked a little about death and the feeling of someone's body sliding off your sword ("Sword?" "Bayonet", said Maglor) and the way war altered what had been a peaceful town by the sea and left it looking like nothing on earth but also like everywhere else the war had come home, before Maglor squinted at him and said "You're a carrion-feeder, aren't you?"

"I like things that are alive," Hemingway said, affronted. "Things that are dead are more interesting for having been alive and things that are alive are interesting because they will be dead."

"That's either very profound or very, very stupid," Maglor said, and gestured to the waiter. 

The oysters he summoned tasted strongly of the sea and the wine washed away their faint metallic taste, leaving only the sea taste. They did not talk again until all the oysters were gone.

Then Maglor began to talk but not about the war. He talked about the sea. He talked about it in a way that made Hemingway want to go and fish in Spain next summer instead of watching the bulls fight and die. Hemingway liked to talk to the fishermen who fished the Seine. Maglor it seemed talked to them too, but the filth-fed tunny that could be caught there were no substitute for the open sky and shore and salt spray. 

They continued to drink the white wine and Maglor continued to talk about the sea. He talked about the incandescence of _méduse_ in the deep waters and their strange circle-shapes dead and bloated on the shore with their dark markings like the iris of a great yellow eye and how they still stung even after they were dead. He talked about the shape of dark terns as they dived into the sea like desperate women and the way fishing line cut into the palms of the hands and the soft parts of fingers like a knife. His hands were like the earth after a bomb had hit and also like the face of the moon.

That was what Hemingway remembered the next day, the hands and the sea. Not the soft mouth or the peak of the night when he had been talking to someone too long and the only thing to do was to punch them or kiss them. The problem was finding someone who didn’t talk about it later. Scott talked and now his wife watched Hemingway when they were in the same room with her mad hawk eyes too close and too sharp. He couldn’t remember whether he had tried to kiss Maglor or punch him but he remembered the taste of the sea in the oyster-shell liquid.

He had stopped taking notes with his pencil or in his head somewhere around the third bottle. The last things he had written were about the diving bodies of bird-women and a man with old eyes and ruined hands and bad luck clinging to him like a curse. There was a boy or two around the edges of the tale. There needed to be. They gave a man hope even when it was too late for hope.

A man like that could only take himself to the sea and dare it to do its worst.

There was a story in that, or might be one day. The man and the sea. It was like a Bible story. It was Job when you boiled it down. 

The old man and the sea.

The sea, the sea.

**Author's Note:**

> Light textual references to The Old Man and the Sea and A Moveable Feast. Tumblr is [here](https://arrivisting.tumblr.com/), hi!


End file.
